Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Ms. Marvel - Super Hero

I know that will seem like a strange post for this blog but.....I make the rules here, so there!

I love to prowl through the bargain bins at comic shops in search of deals on older comics that I might have missed in my checkered history of comic buying. The 25 and 50 cent boxes hold many hours of cheap delights and often I will find whole runs of a particular series that I have been curious about. Last summer I found issues #4 through #10 of the original MS. MARVEL comic book from the late 1970s. I only got around to reading these books last month and I really enjoyed them. It was a blast not just to wallow in very cool art by Jim Mooney and the very 70s-ishness of the storyline but also to watch writer Chris Claremont trying to get a handle on how to write the character of Carol Danvers. The struggle was a complex one involving how to resolve the odd problem of having two separate people in the same body - for no good reason. Its obvious that this dual personality was an unnecessary complication for the character to have to deal with and made getting her on a straight story path difficult at best. This was a mess inherited from the previous writers that should have been resolved with Danvers simply having a secret identity but getting to that point was still in progress when my streak of issues ran out. Claremont was getting some of the smaller problems in line in the seven issues I have, including shifting some of Danver's Kree derived powers from her costume to her actual body so he was moving toward the eventual integration so clearly needed. I'm hoping to find more cheap copies of the rest of the run one day and see just how far things got before the series was cancelled. Maybe I'll just pick up the Marvel Essential volume an call it a win.

And as an aside- Ms. Marvel was easily one of the sexiest comic book characters of the Bronze Age! She was always drawn as a curvaceous goddess and her skimpy outfit was more distracting than even the breast-flashing costume of DC's Power Girl. I was very unhappy when they quietly altered her look with issue number #9 to eliminate the view of her bare midriff. A little bit of my heart still aches that she no longer shows her navel to the world. Its like the TV network hiding Barbara Eden's lovely stomach from the American public all over again.

I first became aware of the character in the pages of Claremont's X-Men as he worked to save her from a terrible storyline foisted on her in The Avengers. I have no idea what has been done with Danvers in the last 20 years or so but I might have to find out if I can pick up some trade paperback collections cheaply enough.